


If She’s Not Killing Me

by longwhitecoats



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Cooking, Eve crushing on Villanelle, F/M, Gen, Knives, Mundane contemplation of murder, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 22:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17150459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longwhitecoats/pseuds/longwhitecoats
Summary: Eve can't do even the simplest task without thinking about her. Set in early in season one, before Bill and Eve go to Berlin.





	If She’s Not Killing Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imperfectcircle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectcircle/gifts).



She’s chopping up chicken for dinner, not thinking about this girl, barely thinking at all. Niko has these killer Polish dumplings that he makes; maybe it’s his grandma’s recipe? But they’re a pain in the ass to do, so the deal is that if Eve wants them, she chops up the chicken. Then Niko chops all the other meat and vegetables, folds the dumplings, and steams them. Right now, Niko is out at the store getting the rest of the ingredients. So Eve is looking down at her hands and the knife and the meat, chop chop chop, and like a double image, she sees the killer’s hands superimposed over her own. Not cooking chicken. But chopping.

Eve stills. She can’t take her eyes off the cutting board, the gristle and fat and bone there. Her mom used to click her tongue at Eve for zoning out like this, freezing up while her mind went somewhere else. But she can’t help it. Distantly, she hears the noise of the street and feels a soft puff of air by her ankles as the heating comes on. All of that feels very far away. Eve is in the hospital, standing in the bathroom, staring at the nurse.

Has she ever done this? Eve wonders. Does she cook? It’s funny to imagine an assassin cooking dinner, especially something messy like this. But it can’t all be glamour and galas, can it? She must know how to use a knife for something other than murder.

What do her hands feel like on the knife when she kills someone? Does it feel like chopping meat?

Slowly, Eve lifts the knife from the cutting board. She washes it in the sink, careful to sponge it clean. She shifts her grip: she rotates the knife so that it’s nearly vertical, the usual gripping edge pressed against the ball of her thumb. This feels wrong. She looks down at her feet, still standing in dutiful housewife position by the kitchen counter.

Eve shakes her hips back and forth in a macabre hokey cokey, loosening the joints. Then she settles into what feels like a natural stance.

She raises the knife to one side, then brings it down on the cutting board as hard as she can.

The knife goes directly through the board, hits the granite countertop, bounces, and slices open the ball of her thumb on its way back up.

“Fuck!” Eve yells, gripping her thumb with her other hand, more out of surprise than pain. She sticks her hand under the sink out of sheer confused instinct and runs cold water on it as if she’s burned herself. “Fucking goddamnit,” she says, more quietly, more resignedly. There’s blood in the chicken.

The front door creaks open and then slams shut, and Eve’s heart sinks as she hears Niko come in.

“They were out of celery, so I—whoa.” Niko stops short when he sees the blood. “You okay? What happened?”

Eve tries to imagine describing what happened. “I cut myself,” she says, and hisses at the sting of the water.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Niko says, his voice tinged with a laugh. He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it. “Doesn’t look deep. You should just put some ointment on it.”

“Ointment actually inhibits healing,” Eve says automatically, and then sighs at the look on Niko’s face. “If you get me a plaster I’ll use it,” she says. “Just to keep more blood from getting in the chicken. Not because it helps.”

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to help,” Niko says, kissing her on the forehead. He jogs up the stairs.

Eve looks at the chicken again. The blood has pooled in a corner and is darkening slowly. Only she and Niko are eating the dumplings. It’s probably fine. It’s not fine. She’s going to eat it anyway.

She wonders if assassins have this problem.

Niko comes back downstairs with the plaster and pries Eve’s left hand from her right. She hadn’t even known she was holding the wound. “There we go,” he says, peeling away the backing and sticking it down. “Good as new. And how _is_ the chicken doing?”

“Fine,” Eve says. “Hey, Niko?”

He looks up at her, his body close. Eve doesn’t know what she wants.

“Could you put away the knife, please?” Eve swallows hard on the words. She searches Niko’s face for some sign that he knows something else is going on here; she almost wants him to know. She wants him to ask, maybe. But she doesn’t want to explain.

Niko just gives her a sad half-smile. “Sure.” He picks up the knife from the floor.

As he stands up, there’s a moment—just a moment—when the knife is in his grip and pointing at Eve’s chest, and the two of them are close. She can smell him, the smell that is only him, mingled with the grocery store smells of cabbage and onion, and layers of baked-in smoke on his jacket from years of playing cards in those homey, dingy halls. He’s tall and strong and looks like he ought to be simple, but he isn’t. She knows how that body moves in the morning when he’s tired and how it moves during sex. His eyes are dark and fixed on hers.

She wants him to drive that knife straight through her heart.

The moment passes; he puts the knife in the sink and scrubs it clean. Then, while she stands frozen, he throws away the contaminated chicken and cleans the counter. He doesn’t say a word about the hole in the cutting board. He starts making dinner. Eventually, when enough time passes without Eve saying anything else, he walks over to the radio and switches it on.

Eve slowly backs into the corner of the room, in the dark, her heart pounding. She watches Niko slowly chop and peel and steam. The smell of her favorite dumplings fills the house.

She doesn’t know why she’s disappointed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta, kutsushita. A very happy Yuletide to you, imperfectcircle!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] If She's Not Killing Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17973509) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




End file.
